Julie Bishop was caught out texting while driving yesterday.
I know you’re busy Julie, but this is one time multitasking is not a good idea.
I know you’re not the first politician to be caught out fiddling with their phone in traffic, but I hope you’re the last.
I don’t remember the accident at all.
The first thing I remember is sucking on one of those brilliant pain whistle things while trapped in the back seat.
My left leg felt really really weird but I couldn’t move it. I shifted around a little and a paramedic leaned in the window to talk to me.
“Please don’t move, we are working on getting you out but if you could just stay still for now that would be best,” he said.
I was stuck in a crumpled two-door hatchback, and one of my legs was doing something strange. One of the other passengers in the car told me later that they had never heard screams of pain as bad as mine that day.
The amazing, wonderful, leg-numbing painkillers basically made me high, and I remember very little about the trip to the hospital in the ambulance, or how they got me out of the car.
My hip was dislocated, but miraculously I hadn’t broken any bones. After they put me under and popped it back in place I woke up in emergency waiting in the line for a scan to determine if I had any spinal damage.
I wasn’t allowed to move until my back and neck were cleared by a doctor, something that took over 24 hours because the first scan hadn’t been done properly.
Until I was moved onto the ward I lay there with the safety glass from the car’s back windscreen still digging into me. I ended up spending a week in the hospital, a month unable to walk at all, and almost two months off work.
Because the woman in the four-wheel-drive behind us was texting while driving.
And really, we were very lucky.
There were four people in our little car and we were stopped at a red light. She hit us hard, and the four-wheel-drive apparently became airborne, thankfully landing beside us, not on top of our car.
I was the only one who didn’t walk away from the accident with just a concussion and bad bruising.
It could have been so much worse.
When she got out of her car, the first thing the woman apparently said was “I wasn’t on my phone”.
Clearly, she was. The driver of our car said she seemed very anxious about her phone, and kept insisting she hadn’t been using it, bringing it up herself.
She didn’t have any other explanation for how she had not seen six cars banked up at a red light on a flat, straight stretch of road.
Top Comments
Never mind, we got that fixed by KASSKIT . If they ever support it, this will never happen again.
Whilst I agree with this article there is a bit of a problem when you are lost, now you could say someone should pull over then use their phone for the GPS, which is what I usually do, however in some cities there is nowhere to pull over because there is such limited stretcparjing.
I was recently on the CBD and was lost, I drove around and around trying to find a spot to park for a moment so I could look at my phone gps to actually locate the parking station I was looking for. As I could find nowhere to park everytime I got to lights I tried to look at GPS, but apparently cops will crack down at people checking phone at lights also, but can someone tell me what is the alternative if there is nowhere in the CBD where you can actually stop?
To complicate matters if and when you do find a parking station they rarely put their rates up at the entrance meaning that you have to drive down deep into the parking station to find out that the rates are ridiculously expensive then you have to drive all the way through the parking station to get out, sometimes wasting 10 minutes to do this and often the exit is on a different street to the entrance so you are even further lost. It should actually be made illegal for parking stations not to advertise their rates at the entrance.